Programming

The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Recent posts (Page 40 of 73)

Advent of Code: Day 16

2015-12-16 in Programming

Source

Part 1: Given a list of target values of the form:

children: 3
cats: 7
samoyeds: 2

And a list of ‘Aunt Sues’, each with known values:

Sue 1: children: 1, cars: 8, vizslas: 7
Sue 2: akitas: 10, perfumes: 10, children: 5
Sue 3: cars: 5, pomeranians: 4, vizslas: 1

Determine which Sue has no unset but matching values.

For example, Sue 1 is invalid because children is 1 versus 3 and Sue 2 because children is 5 versus 3. Given only the values above, Sue 3 would be valid since there are no contradictions.

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Advent of Code: Day 15

2015-12-15 in Programming

Source

Part 1: Input is a list of ingredients of the form:

Frosting: capacity 4, durability -2, flavor 0, texture 0, calories 5
Candy: capacity 0, durability 5, flavor -1, texture 0, calories 8

A recipe score is a product of the positive quantity scores (ignoring calories), where each quantity score is the product of the quantity and that product for each product.

For example, 4 Frosting and 2 Candy above, would have a score of of -2 * 4 + 5 * 2 = 2 for durability and 0 * 4 + -1 * 2 = -2 (and thus ignored as we only accept positive scores) for a total thus far of 2.

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CSV to JSON

2015-12-11 in Programming

Today at work, I had to process a bunch of CSV data. Realizing that I don’t have any particularly nice tools to work with streaming CSV data (although I did write about querying CSV files with SQL), I decided to write one:

$ cat users.csv

"user_id","name","email","password"
"1","Luke Skywalker","[email protected]","$2b$12$XQ1zDvl5PLS6g.K64H27xewPQMnkELa3LvzFSyay8p9kz0XXHVOFq"
"2","Han Solo","[email protected]","$2b$12$eKJGP.tt9u77PeXgMMFmlOyFWSuRZBUZLvmzuLlrum3vWPoRYgr92"

$ cat users.csv | csv2json | jq '.'

{
  "password": "$2b$12$XQ1zDvl5PLS6g.K64H27xewPQMnkELa3LvzFSyay8p9kz0XXHVOFq",
  "name": "Luke Skywalker",
  "user_id": "1",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}
{
  "password": "$2b$12$eKJGP.tt9u77PeXgMMFmlOyFWSuRZBUZLvmzuLlrum3vWPoRYgr92",
  "name": "Han Solo",
  "user_id": "2",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

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